“Russia has the greatest reserve of timber-yielding trees in the world. .” We read this and other facts of much interest in the pages of The Russian Forest, a novel by Л. Леóнов [L. Leonov] that is as heavy as a wooden tenpin. In spring, immense rafts of logs are formed, which never reach their destination but sink to the bottom of the great rivers of Siberia. For Russia, too, is a consumer nation, but only of raw materials. This metaphysical consumerism does not require the laborious elaboration of bulky products or tiresome marketing campaigns, but merely the cutting down of countless hectares of virgin forest or the pumping of great quantities of petroleum, only to burn it off, just like that, without putting it to further use. If the ESTEPA (or STEPPE) represents the field of action, of deployment, the forest is where the Russian nation turns in times of danger.
The BOSCAGE is cold, dark, and silent, an aspect it lends to Russia itself, which, seen from afar, may resemble a “dark wood,” una selva oscura.
BREAD FOR THE MOUTH OF MY SOUL (see: PANIS ORIS INTUS ANIMAE MEAE or P.O.A.).
BRILLIANT CORNERS. When he least expected it and in the least appropriate places, THELONIOUS would sometimes suffer a serious relapse of his malady. For example, the face of a woman with whom he was having an animated conversation would suddenly go flat, recede to an inaccessible distance and blur as if a ghost had passed in front of it. The image that a few moments earlier had been his talkative friend would first regress into an accumulation of features that still, for a second, preserved a vague familial resemblance to their owner, then come apart into a chaos of basic geometric figures. At that point, THELONIOUS would intuit that this was a woman’s face; he would distinguish the clean outline of an oval (different from a circle because its perimeter is not equidistant from the center), two opalescent spheres (the eyes?) covered with a thin film (the eyelids?), the lashes (short, stiff hairs = bristles), the mouth, reducible to the figure of a broken ellipse. As if he were studying an X-ray, a purely geometric outline, the stroke of charcoal on canvas. Only then, as he went along losing points of contact, to be left wandering across immensities of blank plaster, immersed in a silence that was shattered, visually, by intense red flashes, sudden proximities, blooms of flame blindly spinning. Desperate, THELONIOUS tried to grasp hold of the two red half-moons that were patiently modulating words with secret urgency: he followed that vermilion flutter with apparent attention, aware that he was the person being addressed by this discourse that now, thousands of kilometers away, he could no longer grasp. With great care, fearful of losing his footing, he approached slowly, advancing along the narrow path of two rosy protuberances (almost certainly the cheeks), reordering this assortment of geometric figures that, evidently, formed part of his world, and that might plausibly be composed into a woman’s face, seeking to determine the nature of that patch of red, now immobile in a pout of reproach. “But weren’t you listening to me?” And since at that very moment he had discovered, finally, what it was (a pair of lips) and then immediately recognized their owner, the sound switched back on and with it, as if by magic, the meaning of the spiel she had just directed his way.
His malady was the product of a logical breakdown in the natural and involuntary gift of seeing. He was aware of the way we distinguish objects by the contrast between surface and background, the drop-off in light values around the edges, the intricate process of correlation required to endow the naked primary blocks that appear at first sight with meaning. He knew how, in slow evolution, those blocks acquire practical significance, the connotation of a known object: “a fireplace poker” and then not simply a poker but a magnificent poker, the patina on its bronze. In that sense, THELONIOUS found himself as distant from other humans as mankind is from the blackbird: the blackbird that has no history, not the slashed sleeves of a Renaissance tunic nor the voluptuous blooms of Jugendstil, or Art Nouveau. THELONIOUS could, at will, slip through the cracks of sight, descend into a total decomposition of the image, and then ascend back up to admirable syntheses, reaching a point where he saw the world as we will see it several centuries from now, for our way of seeing is also subject to an evolution and every era introduces changes into the world’s appearance. Two years earlier, THELONIOUS had admired some watercolors by Dührer — Alpine vistas made during the painter’s first journey to Italy — that, according to the caption, were the first landscapes in the history of European painting. Some of the sights THELONIOUS enjoyed after his terrible seizures might also have been the first glimpses of an art yet to be created. In the visions bestowed by his malady were present all of modern art’s moves toward blankness, beginning with an entirely impressionist luminosity and passing through the coldness of cubism and the abstractionist aphasia to disappear into a polychrome whirlwind, entirely unforeseen. Except he’d lost control over his gift and let himself “see” in unexpected ways while remaining blind to simple sights, utilitarian visions. He would stop, entranced, before the irregular striping of a fold of satin, given over to the pleasure of studying it, endowing it with a meaning inaccessible to ordinary men. He would concentrate on things that might appear trivial but that meant everything to him: the beauty of a double row of buttons, the sunflower color of a friend’s silk blouse, the slow curves of the chairs in a café. . Then, overcome by an emotion that cannot be narrated — the true and absolute importance of those lines — he would fall, dragged down by vertigo and left blind, the world decomposed into tessellations, and he deep within them, groping for clarity, desperate.
But there was LINDA, to save him.
BRODIAGA (БРОД
ГА: lit., wanderer). The garden beneath my window was like a scaled-down replica of the world I would one day resolve to venture into. I had only to abandon the blank page on my desk and go forth, advancing from tree to tree, my house receding into nothingness amid the birches. What was the breadth of this world? Immense: all Russia. The Volga, and Astrakhan on the Volga, and Samara, its fluvial docks with their barges of watermelons. Vast spaces overrun by the Russian soul; there one could dilute oneself without leaving a trace, lose all track of one’s identity and earn kopecks enough for a meager dinner by unloading watermelons until nightfall, barefoot on that dock. I was not, in fact, Russian but I was well aware of the BRODIAGA life that several of its writers had led and though it wasn’t the type of experience I believed to be important at the age of twenty-three, whenever I felt tempted to make a radical change in the course of my existence I entertained intense thoughts of the striped watermelons of Astrakhan.
To be a BRODIAGA is a state that separates us from the fragile edifice of the day’s order, coffee at breakfast, a poorly remunerated job.Quand tous mes rêves se seraient tournés en réalités, ils ne m’auraient pas suffi; j’aurais imaginé, rêvé, désiré encore. Je trouvais en moi un vide inexplicable que rien n’aurait pu remplir, un certain élancement du coeur vers une autre sorte de jouissance dont je n’avais pas d’idée et dont pourtant je sentais le besoin.Which is to say: If all my dreams had become realities, that wouldn’t have been enough for me; I would have kept on dreaming, imagining, desiring. I found an inexplicable void within myself that nothing could have filled, a certain movement of the heart toward another type of satisfaction that I could not conceive of but for which I felt the need. (Letter from Rousseau to Malesherbes, January 26, 1762)